President Donald Trump has a message for Democrats hoping to seize Congress on November 3: if they win, they will be running into a wall of vetoes.
Speaking to reporters on the White House South Lawn on Friday morning before leaving for a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Florida, Trump made clear he expects Republicans to hold on. But he also laid out exactly what would happen if they don’t.
“Well, I think the Republicans are going to win. But if there was, you call it gridlock, what happens is I veto everything,” Trump said, according to the Washington Examiner. “And then the Democrats come and they want to make a deal. So we’ll work it out.”
“Veto, veto, veto”
Pressed further on the prospect of a divided government, the president described the approach as a time-tested way to bring the other side to the negotiating table. Historically, he said, a president in that situation would “veto, veto, veto, and they come and they say, ‘How do we get it done.’ And we make a deal,” as reported by The Epoch Times.
In other words, Trump is signaling that a Democratic House or Senate would not be able to simply ram its agenda through. Under the Constitution, overriding a presidential veto takes a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate, a high bar that neither party is anywhere close to reaching.
A sparing use of the veto so far
With Republicans controlling both chambers, Trump has rarely needed the veto pen in his second term. The Epoch Times reported he has issued two vetoes during his second administration, compared with 10 in his first term and 13 under former President Joe Biden.
The GOP currently holds small majorities in both the House and the Senate, which is why the midterms are being fought so fiercely. Trump has been crisscrossing the country with campaign-style rallies, including a stop Thursday in Sioux City, Iowa, to back Senate nominee Ashley Hinson.
Early voting is underway
The stakes are already being decided at the ballot box. According to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, as cited by The Epoch Times, more than 22 million Americans had voted early as of Friday, including more than 10 million early in-person voters and more than 12 million returned mail ballots.
Trump also told reporters he might be “voting tomorrow” in Florida. Asked which party was benefiting from the early vote so far, he answered simply: “Nobody knows.”
Election Day is Tuesday, November 3.